As portable electronic devices become more prevalent over time, the need for parental control and/or employer control of such devices increase. These portable electronic devices have the ability to receive, transmit, present, and create media objects, such as video files, still images, animations, or the like. Some of these portable electronic devices include a built-in camera that allows a user to create an image and quickly distribute the image with little effort. One concern that arises from the ability to easily receive, send, present, and create images on the portable device, is the type of images being sent, received, presented, or created, such as done in “sexting.” “Sexting” is the act of sending sexually explicit messages or photos, primarily between mobile devices, such as the children's mobile phones. With the rise in “sexting,” especially in the case of sending of explicit images to and from children and teenagers, parents need a way to view all images received, transmitted, presented, or created on their children's phones. Likewise, employers may have a need to monitor images being sent, received, presented, or created on a company-owned phone. Because images can be received or sent via Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) or email messages, stored in a memory card or the phone's memory, presented by the phone, or created by the phone, there is no single place for manual inspection of a phone to review all images associated with the phone.
In another context, individuals may wish to quickly review images stored on their phone before deciding which ones to keep or delete. Like above, there is no single place for manual inspection of the phone to review all images associated with the phone, and the cost of transmission of high quality images or video over the network may be too great.
One existing solution provides for transmitting images created by an integrated camera of a mobile device to a server. However, sending the images over the network, such as over the cellular network, can dramatically affect the data plan consumption, bandwidth, battery life, operating system (OS) speed, or other usability factors of the phone. Also, as these devices become more sophisticated, these devices create larger image files. For example, some mobile phones have up to 12-13 megapixel cameras that are capable of capturing high quality images, which result in large files approximately 18-96 MB uncompressed or approximately 2-8 MB compressed. Video files could be even larger. Monitoring solutions that transmit a full-size copy of each image across the network, which often has a limited bandwidth, may be impractical in the parental and employer control context.
Existing techniques fail to provide efficient solutions for enabling efficient review of pictures associated with a mobile device.